Where the Bodies Were Buried (25 page)

In 2012, when I interviewed John Connolly, he told me about the time he introduced Bulger to Jeremiah O'Sullivan. The meeting took place in
December 1978, and it had a sense of urgency. A few months earlier, Bulger had been abruptly dropped as a Top Echelon Informant when it was announced to the FBI that he was the target of a federal investigation. Being the target of a criminal probe disqualified someone from being an informant.

In Bulger's case, he and his partner Flemmi were part of a massive investigation involving the fixing of horse races at tracks throughout the Northeast. Spearheaded by a consortium of prosecutors from different jurisdictions, the investigation had been ongoing for years. A sprawling web of criminals, led by Howie Winter, had bought off jockeys and had been fixing races at eight different tracks in five states. Investigators in New Jersey had initiated the case revolving around an informant named Anthony “Fat Tony” Ciulla, a Boston Mafiosi who, along with Winter, had devised the scam. For nearly four years the gangsters had been fixing horse races at tracks in New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and elsewhere. It was estimated that, from 1974 to 1978, they had netted more than $8 million.

In the fall of 1978, Ciulla testified in front of a grand jury in New Jersey. Now the case was spreading to the District of Massachusetts, and federal indictments seemed imminent.

Agents John Connolly and John Morris were concerned that they were about to lose their prize informants, Bulger and Flemmi. So they met with Jeremiah O'Sullivan, lead prosecutor in the case.

It went against FBI informant-handling regulations for the agents to reveal the identity of an active informant to anyone, including a federal prosecutor. But these were special circumstances. Bulger and Flemmi represented the FBI's best chance for making a major case against Jerry Angiulo and the Mafia, which had became the number-one priority in the Boston field office. The agents explained all this to O'Sullivan, who shared their dream of a major case targeting the Angiulo brothers. O'Sullivan told the agents he would look into it and get back to them.

According to Connolly, he later heard from O'Sullivan, who wanted to meet Bulger. “I asked him, ‘Are you sure? You don't have to.'” It was highly unusual for an assistant U.S. attorney to meet face-to-face with someone like Bulger. But O'Sullivan insisted. Connolly set up a meeting between
the city's rising mobster and its top organized crime prosecutor in a hotel room on a rainy afternoon around Christmas. “I was there,” Connolly told me. “Jimmy met Jerry. As I remember it, they were both quite impressed with one another.”

After this meeting, in January 1979, O'Sullivan agreed to drop Bulger and Flemmi from the indictment. They were free and clear.

On February 3, 1979, the indictments were announced. It was as if an atomic bomb had been dropped on the New England underworld. Twenty-one gangsters were arrested in a series of high-profile raids throughout the region. Thanks to Connolly, John Martorano had learned about the indictment and gone on the run. Howie Winter was not tipped off and had been arrested; he was facing a twenty-year sentence.

Bulger was reinstated as a Top Echelon Informant. In addition, Steve Flemmi was officially reopened as a TE in February 1980, with Special Agent John Connolly as his handler.

The circle of continuity was complete: as Flemmi's handler, Connolly officially assumed the role of H. Paul Rico, an agent he still referred to many years later, from prison, as “a great man.”

The race-fixing case was a turning point on many levels. It virtually wiped out the Winter Hill Mob: along with Howie Winter, Jim Martorano was also arrested. Brother Johnny was forced to go on the lam. “Joe Mac” McDonald, who was already on the lam, was forced to stay. A host of other affiliated criminals were either arrested or forced into hiding and out of the rackets.

Already, Whitey had eliminated the Mullen gang. Now, with the help of the FBI and the most powerful federal prosecutor in New England, he had been a party to the elimination of the Winter Hill Mob. The gang that had been founded by Buddy McLean, then expanded upon by Howie Winter, Joe Mac, Jimmy Sims, and the Martorano brothers, was now under the sole control of Bulger and Flemmi.

Whitey didn't have to make trips over to the Marshall Motors garage in Somerville anymore. The Winter Hill Mob was dead. It was all Whitey and Stevie now, with South Boston as their exclusive base of operation.

The FBI agents made the introductions, but O'Sullivan had pulled the trigger. Bulger's connections had now expanded beyond Connolly and
Morris into a new and more exalted realm of the criminal justice system. The pieces were in place for Bulger to become boss of the entire Boston underworld. Only one thing stood in his way: the Mafia.

AT THE BULGER
trial, prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly had little to gain by shedding light on this narrative of alliances between the underworld and the upperworld in Boston. They were more concerned with establishing a link between Bulger and the victims of his crimes. The links to O'Sullivan were especially problematic for the prosecutors. After O'Sullivan left the Organized Crime Strike Force in 1987, he became U.S. attorney, a predecessor to the person currently holding the job, Carmen Ortiz. To ponder the irony that O'Sullivan, a key component in Bulger's rise to power, was once in control of the very office that now sought to prosecute the mob boss was something the prosecutors needed to stifle at every turn. Instead, the jury was treated to a more plebeian narrative, some of it punctuated with low humor.

When Frank Capizzi took the stand, courtroom spectators might have guessed they were in for a show. Capizzi was seventy-nine years old, with his white hair in a ponytail. He wore an out-of-date sport coat, and had a voice out of central casting. He spoke in the gravelly tones of the late actor Michael V. Gazzo, who played the character Frank Pantangeli in
The Godfather: Part II
—a voice so redolent of the streets that for generations after that movie was released, young Mafiosi who thought they sounded tough were merely doing an imitation of Michael Gazzo.

Capizzi, on the other hand, was an original. His time in the underworld predated both
Godfather
movies.

He took the stand with a wild-eyed look, as if taking the stand in a criminal court preceding was something he had feared his entire life. He glanced in the direction of Bulger but seemed disoriented, as if everything about the environment he was in suggested that he had arrived prematurely at his own conception of hell on earth.

The prosecutor, Zach Hafer, sensed the witness's discomfort and sought to put him at ease. “Sir,” he said, “before we get to the substance of your testimony, I want to ask you a few questions about your medical condition,
if I could. Do you have a condition, sir, that causes something referred to as audio interruption?”

“Yes, absolutely,” said Capizzi.

“Could you explain that?”

“After I had encephalitis meningitis, I got a condition. When I hear you speak, I have to stop and think about what you're saying, because what you're saying to me comes over in the Sicilian language. Some words are English, some words are Sicilian, and I have to decipher.”

Oh boy: audio interruption. Did such a thing exist? There were titters in the courtroom among the jury and the spectators. It sounded like the beginnings of a comedy routine. Said Hafer, “If you need me to repeat anything or slow down, just let me know.”

Capizzi was there to serve the same function as Diane Sussman de Tennen, Ralph DeMasi, and others who had survived Winter Hill gangland mayhem from the time of the gang wars and could now provide sinew and flesh to crimes that might otherwise be perceived as remote or outdated.

Back in 1973, like a lot of gangsters in Boston, Capizzi found himself caught up in the Winter Hill Mob's murderous hunt for Indian Al Notarangeli. In Capizzi's case, he was in a car one night with a couple of members of Notarangeli's crew, Al “Bud” Plummer and Hugh “Sonny” Shields. They had just pulled up to a stoplight at the intersection of Commercial and Hanover streets, in the heart of the city's North End.

Capizzi felt safe on Hanover Street. He'd been born and raised in a cold-water flat at 452 Hanover Street, on the exact corner where he now sat in the backseat of Al Plummer's car. This was his neighborhood. His parents had come here from the same town in Sicily, only they didn't know that until they met on Hanover Street. They both found work in the garment industry. But Capizzi's father, who was a tailor, died suddenly when Frank was in his late teens, and his mother passed away a year later. Frank was on his own. In 1952, he joined the U.S. Coast Guard, and for a time was stationed at a Coast Guard facility located, of all places, at the corner of Commercial and Hanover streets. After leaving the Coast Guard, young Frank Capizzi became a numbers runner and a gambler and, according to law enforcement, a made member of La Cosa Nostra.

Before he was sitting in the backseat of Al Plummer's car, at an
intersection near where much of his life seemed to have taken place, Capizzi was at a bar having a drink. He decided to go see his Sicilian grandmother. “She still lived in the North End, and thinking about this, I knew she never slept. So it was ten o'clock at night, and I was going to pay her a good-night visit. She was about eighty-five, I think, or eighty-eight at the time. And she still lived on Hanover Street.” So he was on his way to give his grandmother a good-night kiss on the cheek, and he'd enlisted Al Plummer to give him a ride.

Asked Hafer, “What happened after you got into the car with Plummer and Shields on March 19, 1973?”

Capizzi paused; the prosecutor's words seemed to be bouncing around inside his head. “Excuse me. I was just deciphering what you were saying.”

“No problem. Take your time. After you were in the car driving towards Hanover Street, did something unusual happen?”

“Unusual?” The witness seemed insulted by the word's inadequacy. “A firing squad hit us,” he proclaimed. “For maybe two and a half minutes, about a hundred slugs hit the automobile, and it imploded.”

“Could you tell from the noise how many guns were firing at you?”

“I'll speculate. It sounded and felt like maybe two automatic weapons and maybe a couple of rifles or pistols.”

The jury had heard about this event from one of the men on the other side of the guns—Martorano—who testified that he and Howie Winter did the shooting from one car, with Bulger and others providing backup in another.

“What did you do when the shooting stopped?” asked Hafer.

“Unbelievably, although I had been hit in the head and could feel warm blood running down my neck and excruciating pain in my back, I said, ‘Let's get the fuck out of this car. Bud, come on.' And I put my hand into his neck where his head should have been.” Plummer's head had been obliterated by the fusillade of bullets.

Capizzi's testimony was dramatic, and as he explained being rushed to the hospital and undergoing emergency surgery—which saved his life—he warmed to the idea of having a captive audience. Capizzi told the jury and everyone in the courtroom that after that fateful day in 1973, which resulted in the death of Al Plummer, he left the city of his birth and never returned.

On cross-examination, the witness became feisty, as if he were once
again a gangster back on the streets. When defense attorney Carney asked if Jerry Angiulo was the head of a criminal group in the North End, he answered, “That's what the papers say.”

“Do you know that yourself?” asked Carney.

“You know, ask me a more specific question. Did I know that? The question should be, Who doesn't know that?”

The courtroom erupted in laughter. Capizzi smiled; he was getting the hang of this. But then Carney started asking about specific criminal activities, and Capizzi's audio interruption kicked in. “Say that again?” he responded to a question about illegal gambling, which he theoretically heard half in Sicilian and half in English. And to another question, “Would you repeat that again—slowly? I wanna get every word,” to which jurors and spectators again burst into laughter.

When Carney asked Capizzi about whether Al Notarangeli made his living from bookmaking forty years ago, he responded, “Forty years ago? Who remembers a lot of what we did forty years ago? He probably gambled like the rest of us.”

Then Carney got specific: “Were you involved in any way in illegal bookmaking?”

Capizzi gave the lawyer a hard stare, the kind he may have given to late-paying gambling clients back in the day. He turned to the judge. “Your Honor, I'm going to invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment.”

The judge tried to explain to Capizzi that he already had immunity to testify; he didn't need to claim the Fifth. He could not be prosecuted for anything he might say. But Capizzi wasn't buying it. He asked to see a court-appointed lawyer. So he was removed from the stand until a lawyer could be found to explain the situation. Meanwhile, other minor witnesses were brought to the stand to give testimony.

After a few hours, Capizzi was brought back to the witness stand. He was ready to resume. But, in the intervening time, defense lawyer Carney had apparently decided that this witness, with his audio interruption and selective memory, was more trouble than he was worth. Capizzi took the stand, and Carney said, “Your Honor, I have no further questions.”

“Mr. Capizzi,” said Judge Casper. “You don't have to get comfortable. Examination is completed. You're excused.”

Capizzi seemed positively thrilled. “Thank you, Your Honor.”

“No problem, sir.”

As the aging Mafiosi stood up, there were chuckles of appreciation in the courtroom. He looked out at the people, as if a standing ovation might be in order. “Thank you, everyone,” he announced. “I appreciate it. It's been an experience.”